Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed considerably growing interest among histori­ans of ideas in the contribution of Erastianism to Early Modern religious-polit­ical thought; and, more specifically, the place of Erastianism in the evolution of what we are used to call (if possibly not unreservedly) �secular modernity'.

In the broadest sense of the term, â€?Erastianism' applies to all positions and strategies in early modern religious-political discourse that were - basically in response to radical political Calvinism and therefore with a natural cen­tre of gravity in the Reformed world - aiming at the subordination of church law to civil law.¹ Once the initial debates of the name-giver Thomas Erastus (a Heidelberg-based humanist physician of Zwinglian confession)^{[601] [602] with Theodore de Beze and other Calvinist leaders over the churches' divine right to excommunicate (which Erastus denied) were received by a broader European audience, numerous authors contributed to Erastian discourse, most of them from the Dutch Republic and England, where, due to the particularly close interconnection of confessionalisation with social and constitutional history, Erastian ideas were received with a special interest.}

In many cases, these ideas were defended with strong implications for pushing back ecclesiastical control over the individual's religious behaviour and conscience, which made them an important factor in paving the way for toleration ideas.^[603] The inventory of publications on the topic, as well as of those on further political and social claims that were developed in an Erastian frame­work, is impressive, and comprises prominent names such as Franciscus Junius the elder, Peter Cunaeus, John Selden, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza - and, in between these, Hugo Grotius.^[604]

If the civil ruler's control over the exercise of ecclesiastical authority pro­vided the common religious-political ground of Erastianism in its different settings, its strategical common ground was to argue along an interpretation of Sacred history and divine law.

Erastian political ideas were ranging from demanding civilian control over church discipline via claiming the subordination of the church under the state to demonstrating the juridical and political identity of state and church. To this rough typology corresponds, if likewise roughly, the historical development of Erastianism - ranging from Erastus's interventions against the churches' divine right to excommunicate^[605] via Grotius's claim of the churches' subservience to the magistrates to the conceptually highly reflected Erastianism of Thomas Hobbes, who notoriously conceived his mature political work, the Leviathan, as the theory of a commonwealth at once �ecclesiastical and civil.’^[606]

This typology is not inclusive, for certainly, Erastianism did not stop being effective with Hobbes (neither with Spinoza, whose Theological-political Treatise (1670) was a direct response not only to Hobbes’s theory of the con­tractual institution and consensual legitimacy of political sovereignty, but also to the way in which Hobbes had aimed to present his concept of political sovereignty as virtually emerging from the history of the Jewish and Christian religions).

With Hobbes, however, the systematic fusion of Erastianism with an abso­lutist theory of political sovereignty was accomplished, and, in turn, final decline began of the early, humanist history of Erastianism.^[607] In its early phase, the predominant strategy of Erastians had been to argue along an interpreta­tion of Sacred history, foremost the Old Testament,^[608] and with a special focus on the analysis of the constitution and laws of the Hebrew Republic, the unique historical manifestation of a veritable �theocracy’, as Flavius Josephus had notoriously called it. Of this divinely instituted republic, Erastians argued, God himself had been the sovereign, civil and religious law had been identical, and as there had, therefore, been neither reason nor institutional place for a �church' different from the state, it must be concluded that all religious institu­tions had been under the civil ruler's control.^[609]

There were numerous steps leading from the earlier humanist discourse of the Hebrew Republic to Hobbes's systematic incorporation of Erastianism in his theory of absolutist representation.^{[610] [611] [612] [613] One of these steps would prove to be of eminent conceptual importance, but has astonishingly not drawn much atten­tion yet.}

Grotius as well had started his career as a political writer in the footsteps of classical, humanist Erastianism, both strategically and conceptually. His premature (unpublished) treatise De republica emendanda (around 1600)i² gives abundant evidence of his already being well acquainted with Erastian political ideas. In this treatise, Grotius had at once made proposals for a more centralised administration of the Dutch provinces and argued for the suprem­acy of the civil magistrates over the church. Both these programmatic points were expressly based on a comparison of the Dutch situation with the resto­ration of the Hebrew theocracy after the return from the Egyptian captivity. In ancient Israel, national and religious restoration as well had gone hand in hand, resulting in the institution of a republic that could rightly be called the â€?Church of God'.1³ For the very fact that theJewish state was considered as being immediately ruled by God seemed to prevent any attempt of political as well as priestly tyranny, so that the Hebrew theocracy could be praised as the unique model, both historically and politically, for the administrative and ecclesio-political constitution of the young Dutch Republic. On this basis, also Grotius's arguments concerning the state-church-relation had broadly fol­lowed the pathway of contemporary Hebraist Erastianism.^[614]

None of Grotius's (presently known) religious-political interventions in the period preceding De imperio (neither Meletius (1612) nor Ordinum pietas (1613) nor further publications from the Lubbertus-controversy) would revive the topic of the Hebrew Republic in a comparably encompassing manner.

One major contribution of De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra would be to provide such conceptual substitute - and to integrate it with �classical' Erastian accounts of biblical and church history in a way that was not only to lift Erastian discourse on an entirely new stage of conceptualis­ation, but also virtually to invert the classical historical pattern of human­ist Erastianism - the analysis of the political constitution of the Hebrew Republic.

From De imperio onwards, Grotius would read the political history of the Hebrews, and, by extension, the entire history of divine lawgiving, against the background of an overall narrative of (divine) natural law - a narrative that was not only meant to give account of political rule and religious authority by explaining their respective places in Sacred history, but also to give account of the �natural' interaction between secular power and divine authority. By doing so, De imperio would momentously shift the focus of Erastian argument from the immediate political reading of the biblical laws to their analysis, and reconstruction, in terms of natural law and ius gentium. And this not so much in the way as to construct a mere parallel, or coincidence, between political concepts and biblical history (which had been more or less the strategy of De republica emendanda). De imperio would, by contrast, rather integrate the legal (natural law-based) principles of the civil sovereign's ius circa sacra in a kind of retroactive biblical-historical narrative that would make them appear as gen­uine products of Sacred history. Among the most important, and presumably most influential, effects of this strategy was that Grotius's way to reconstruct the cross-history of divine natural law and positive divine lawgiving would eventually lead to a considerable revaluation, and lastly devitalisation, of the central theme and historical anchor of humanist Erastianism - the topic of the Hebrew Republic. From Grotius onwards, the Hebrew Republic as political model of the Protestant state would progressively be replaced by a broader concept of biblical anthropology that would range among the major issues to be inherited from Grotius by the Early Enlightenment.

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